School Board Meeting   11/2/2023

Good afternoon everybody.

I'll call this meeting to order.

Ms.

Bryson Morsberger.

Ms.

Dooley.

Here.

Dr. Kraft.

Present.

Ms.

McKeever.

Ms.

And our student rep, Mrs. Turner.

Here.

The next item on the agenda is approval of the agenda.

Do we have a motion?

Any discussion?

All in favor?

Aye.

All opposed?

Now at this time, we will have comments from the community.

When you come forward, please state your name,

and your address, you have three minutes to comment.

So I do have a list of folks who have signed up to speak.

Good evening board members and Dr. Gurley.

My name is Derek Hartline.

I live at 1517 Apartment P. Antoinette Avenue, lifelong city resident.

I'm back tonight to discuss the school naming and the revised policy for discussion tonight.

Since the entire process was put on hold in April, there hasn't been any community input, transparency, or board discussion on committing to a process that you, the board, said you wanted to stand behind.

You can imagine my surprise when I read the agenda for tonight.

The revised policy states that no current building or school shall be named after individuals and any that presently are named after an individual, a new name should be identified.

At the April 1st, 2020 board meeting, five of the seven current members and Dr. Odi who will be presenting this tonight heard Monica Blair and Beth Baptist discuss this

and assured you and the community would be done right and not rushed.

It's as if CCS went from being aware that our school's name sends a message and to reflect our values to making a blanket statement that all names must change.

If this policy is approved on December 7th, it would include their namesake, Nanny Koch Johnson, who Jackson Vias partially named for.

She embodies the vision stated in the strategic plan that just came out.

I feel it would be a huge travesty to have her name removed

from the first planned integrated school built in the city.

She was a teacher who motivated and demanded the best from all students while working tirelessly to plan newer and better programs to meet the times.

In the past, I've come before the board to discuss Johnston Elementary, but this is my 20th year as a teacher at Jackson Viya, and there's so much to learn about this extraordinary individual, prominent African-American educator at Jefferson for 46 years, created the city school's first lunch program, one of the most substantial African-American landowners in Charlottesville,

She obtained many scholarships that students could go to college.

This revised policy would take away the honor bestowed to her by the school board.

If this takes place, the following quote applies here.

Those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Let me point out how the city of Charlottesville has just done that.

In 1939, the city took her family's home to build the All-White Lane High School.

Then the land her family had inherited was taken to build City Hall.

If that weren't bad enough, urban renewal of Vinegar Hill took most of the rest.

The way this policy revision is stated, it refers to school names after individuals leaving only one school left.

and that'd be Greenbrier Elementary, named for the neighborhood in which it was built in 1962 before desegregation in all city schools.

During this time, racial restrictive covenants were a barrier until the Fair Housing Act went into law in 68.

I would like to know how many families who were displaced when urban renewal took Vinegar Hill were relocated to Greenbrier?

Probably not one, but this policy would allow it to keep its name.

Given this information, is the school board really okay with this policy when it doesn't promote equality?

Lastly, why is this proposed policy trying to be rushed right before new members begin and old members leave?

Thank you, Mr. Hart.

Good evening school board members and Dr. Gurley.

I'm very excited to be before you tonight with our certification election behind us.

Thank you to the ways you supported and communicated to make this election happen.

CEA was elected by 98% of the vote to be the exclusive representative for our licensed staff.

This is an unprecedented victory and shows the incredible support for CEA and for this process.

In the next few weeks, we are going to elect our bargaining team, and we look forward to working with you to shape our first bargain contract.

Thank you.

Good evening, schoolmen.

Good evening school board members.

My name is Jack Gillican and I am a sixth grader at Walker.

I am concerned about the lack of time for lunch and recess, and so I made a petition that got over 200 student signatures.

I showed the petition to Miss Thompson and she said she did not think that there was anything that could be done this year.

Recently, I learned about the wellness policy, which says students in grades five and six should get 20 minutes of seated time at lunch and 25 minutes of recess.

However, we do not get either of these at Walker.

I have been in correspondence with Dr. Gurley about finding a solution, and I would like your help in fixing this problem this year.

Students need time to eat and play just as much as we need time to learn.

Thank you, Jack.

Thank you.

Thank you all who came forth to speak this evening to value input.

The next item on the agenda is adoption of consent agenda.

I believe we had a request to.

To pull the

Is there a second?

Second.

Any other discussion?

All in favor?

Aye.

All opposed?

Motion passed.

Good evening, Mr. Chair, members of the board, and those assembled.

I stand before you this evening requesting that you approve the certification of the CEA as the representative of the licensed bargain unit.

On October the 16th of 2023, there was a certification election held and of the 527 eligible voters, 357 did vote with 350 of those votes for the CEA as the sole representative.

My ask is that you vote to approve and recognize the CEA as the bargain, their sole representative bargain.

Thank you, Dr. Berlin.

Any discussion?

All in favor?

Aye.

All opposed?

The next item on the agenda is items for discussion.

Mr. Chairman, members of the board, Dr. Gurley, good evening.

Tonight, I will come to you to provide information about Charlottesville City Schools All In Plan regarding attendance, literacy, and learning.

We'll call it the Better Together Boost Plan, or BTB, here in Charlottesville.

Next slide.

You'll see here the strategic plan areas that will be addressed by our BTB plan.

We're looking at two priority areas specifically, priority one and priority two.

You can see the goals there and targets that align with the work that we'll be doing.

I won't take the time to read that.

I know you're well versed in our new strategic plan at this point.

Next slide, please.

The summon substance is here.

All of the things that I'll be talking about tonight.

What exactly is the all-in plan?

I'll talk a little bit more about what we're going to be doing regarding attendance, literacy, and learning.

Who the students are that would benefit from our plan.

When would tutoring occur?

Because a lot of this is about tutoring.

Who actually would be working with our students and where we are in this work?

And then we would end with some next steps.

Next slide, please.

So what exactly is All In?

In early September, Governor Youngkin announced All In Virginia as a comprehensive plan to support Virginia's students facing the continued detrimental impacts of COVID-19, the learning loss that is evident because of it, the declining academic performance and absenteeism across the state.

And then on Tuesday, September 12th, the governor provided school divisions with the high intensity academic playbook, recommendations and best practices for high impact tutoring.

That document outlines a division's recommendations on how to implement all-in tutoring, Virginia's high intensity tutoring to accelerate at-risk students in grades three through eight.

Reviewing the playbook that they provided, we were very encouraged because much of the work that's described in that playbook, we're already doing right here in Charlottesville City Schools.

with our intervention blogs, our win time.

So that was really encouraging to us.

You'll see here that all stands for attendance, literacy, and learning.

As I mentioned before, the governor and the state superintendent, Dr. Lisa Coons, outlined their plan to provide Virginia school divisions with funding to improve student attendance and combat the learning loss mentioned before.

There is an expectation that each school division will use 70% of their funding on tutoring, 20% on literacy, including the Virginia Literacy Act, and 10% to combat chronic absenteeism.

Charlottesville City Schools will receive $946,637 to do this work.

And school divisions will have three years to spend down those funds.

As we move through this presentation, I'll give you some ideas of what we're gonna do and how we're going to work to spend those funds to improve our attendance and increase student achievement here in Charlottesville.

Next slide, please.

starting with the A for attendance.

We have a planning committee that consists of those people there, Dr. Johnson, Carolyn Swift, Rachel Rasnick, and Bianca Johnson.

They're working on a campaign, a division-wide campaign to improve student attendance.

Part of that includes organizing student-led and community-led events.

Attendance contests and by that I mean students are going to participate in a contest to encourage others to come to school and a student design logo.

We're also proposing two attendance positions and they would play a crucial role in conducting after school after school attendance meetings and recovery sessions and

They would engage in home visits and facilitate attendance meetings and assessing the needs of our chronically absent students.

This work we do, we do already, these would just be extra hands to support this important work.

In addition, they would proactively work to identify students at risk of chronic absenteeism to implement preventative measures.

We want to be proactive instead of always reactive.

Now some of the items that I mentioned tonight will be funded through the all-in funds that I've shared before that we would receive.

We know with only 10% of it being able to be focused on attendance, it would not fully fund two positions.

We anticipate that it would support funding those positions.

That would be a part of it.

The team is working on creating a task force and an implementation plan.

And I'm sure you'll hear more about that as they continue that work, Dr. Johnson and the team that I mentioned there.

We're just getting started with now that we have all of the information from the governor and the state superintendent, we're starting this important work.

So I'm sure we'll hear more about that in the coming weeks and months.

Next slide, please.

The first L in all is for literacy.

And I'll just speak a little bit about that because you have a more in-depth presentation coming later this evening from our literacy coordinator, Stacy Riedel.

So you may recall that the Virginia Literacy Act or VLA was passed in the 2022 General Assembly with the goal of improving early literacy outcomes for students.

According to the VLA, school divisions will receive lots of supports such as tools and resources and technical assistance and funding.

Reading specialists are a key component to the VLA and we learned recently

that they will be participating in a Canvas course that the VDOE is providing.

So that Canvas course is going to help them to continue to grow and be even better at building teacher capacity with evidence-based literacy instruction grounded in that all important science of reading.

So as I said earlier, 20% of the funding that we would receive

from the All In Funds will be used on literacy.

So I'll be working with Ms.

Rideau closely to utilize the funds in this area.

Next slide, please.

And now we get to the second ill in all, learning.

This is where we will spend 70% of the funds.

Here you will see some of the guiding principles from the playbook that the VDOE provided.

High-intensity and high-dosage tutoring, low teacher-student ratio, grade-level materials, digital platforms that the DOE is providing for free of cost and no cost.

Ignite Reading for Reading and Zearn for Math are the two programs that they're providing.

and trained and supported tutors, relationships, relationships, relationships, we know how important that is, and progress monitoring.

While much of this is, again, already taking place in our classrooms each and every day, we are making Clark, Walker and Buford priorities in this work.

All schools will benefit, but Clark, Walker and Buford would be the priorities here.

What happens at those three schools will look different than the other schools because of their needs, their specific needs.

Next slide, please.

So again, here in Charlottesville City Schools, we have our version of the all-in plan called Better Together Boost, or BTB.

We want to provide our students with the much-needed boosts.

And of course, we've already seen that we are better together.

So we are going to do this work together.

Next slide, please.

As we talk about who the students are that will be getting this boost, the playbook recommends third through eighth grade students, so they will be our focus.

Specifically, we will be looking at supporting at-risk students, those students that scored in the low proficient range on their third through seventh grade reading and or math assessments.

And we'll look at students who are not proficient, meaning they were not successful.

They did not pass their SOL tests during that time.

Certainly, we're going to continue working with our students with disabilities and our students who are English language learners as well.

As a note, students who were not proficient or who failed reading or math should be prioritized, will be prioritized in scheduling and service with tutoring.

Next slide, please.

Here you'll see a page from that playbook that outlines the students the VDOE is recommending we work with regarding tutoring.

As you can see, it gives specific scores that we will focus on for the third graders in their fall SOL growth test.

And the SOL score ranges for the low proficient or at risk students who are in fourth through eighth grade.

you may be thinking that could be quite a few students, and you're right.

That is, we have, if you're looking at students who score between 400 and 447, which is a pretty solid pass, it's a lot of students that we would look at.

That is why we're gonna focus on the not proficient first.

those students that were not successful in passing the SOL.

Next slide please.

On this slide, you will see when tutoring could occur.

Remember, we are doing a lot of this work during the day.

We already have intervention occurring in our classrooms.

We already have WIN blocks, which stands for What I Need, occurring in our schools.

So our principals are looking at how to enhance that time during the day.

And some are looking at afterschool opportunities for students for tutoring.

and some, at least one, is even looking at possibly including Saturday school.

All of this, of course, depends on availability of staff and availability of tutors that would be willing to do this work.

Next slide, please.

As for who would work with our students, we're looking at currently licensed teachers.

Our teachers, our principals have been reaching out to their own teachers to see if they would be willing to support this effort after school.

We're looking at, you know, I want to work with HR to see if we have retired teachers who may be willing to come back and tutor our students.

Teachers who have exited the profession for whatever reason, maybe to be a stay-at-home parent.

Maybe willing to work a few hours to support this work.

So we'll be working with HR to see if we can find some folks who are interested there.

We hope to have UVA students who would come and we already have some who are supporting our schools with tutoring so we want to get more and we understand from our UVA partners that there are others who are willing and ready to support.

And we may use our partners at the Boys and Girls Club and the YMCA to lean in to support as well.

Next slide please.

So where are we in this work?

We've met with principals a couple of times and shared information with them and we asked them to tell us what their plans were.

They know their schools best.

All of our schools are different and they have different needs.

So we want to have plans that are set up to meet individual schools' needs.

The principals, I asked them to submit proposals.

of how they would like to utilize tutoring in their schools, how much funding they felt that their school needed and they have submitted those proposals, all based on their students' needs and how they see this working in their schools.

And of course, in the meantime, they've been recruiting tutors, as I mentioned before.

We have met with the Boys and Girls Club, I think twice already, to discuss how they can support us in this work.

They're ready, willing and ready to support.

I've reached out to the YMCA.

They're in our buildings after school and so I'm hopeful that they will be able to support after school as well.

We just we know that they have immediate access to a specific group of our kids after school so maybe they would be able to lean in as well.

Content coordinators are aware and stand ready to support reading specialists and math specialists in developing content for tutors as needed.

If we happen to have external tutors that raise their hand, and we've got the position posted, so if we have people that say, I'm happy to help, but I haven't been a teacher before, we wanna train them, we wanna

Let them know how we do things and so that they can support as well.

So we would provide the lessons developed by our reading and math specialists.

and we've collaborated with finance to review the allocations that the state is providing to us and to review the proposals that the principals have submitted to us with their requests for funding.

And we've submitted our plan.

You're going to see that later on a next step.

But we have submitted our plan and we are currently awaiting approval by the state.

Next slide, please.

So next steps, we again, we've actually already reviewed the proposals that the principals have submitted.

And we've already submitted our plan and we're waiting for approval or any feedback from the state.

At this time, we're going to be hiring tutors

Some principals have already had teachers who have raised their hand and say, yes, I'm willing to help.

I'm willing to do this after school important work to help our students move forward.

But we need more.

Some schools had a larger list of what they needed because guess what?

Like I said before, our schools have different needs.

Clark, Walker, Buford specifically need additional supports.

We're preparing the digital platforms for student use.

I've gone through the process to let the state know that we would be using these in all six of our elementary schools in Walker and in Buford.

And so now we just are needing to get folks trained on how to use those.

There are webinars that have already been out there that are available for anybody to sign up for.

I think on the

Doeys website, and some of us have already sat through some webinars.

So we're learning and want to get better at these two great learning platforms.

And we're in the early stages.

So we hope to get started soon with tutoring as soon as possible.

as soon as we can get everybody trained on the digital platforms and as soon as we can receive the thumbs up on our plan from the state and as soon as we receive the funds once they approve our plan which I am hopeful that they will approve it as is once they approve our plan then they will start sending us funds each month and we will be able to compensate the folks that we are going to be hiring

So as soon as we do those things and we hire tutors and communicate with families, then we're going to be ready to move forward with this process.

Next slide, please.

So that gives you a bit of information about the all-in funding, the all-in plan that we'll be receiving to support our students with attendance and literacy and learning.

Again, it's our Better Together Boost plan, or BTB.

You'll hear that a lot in our schools, hopefully.

Everybody getting excited, we wanna give them snacks,

a little break after school, have some fun with the tutoring and activities and everybody's excited about BTB.

Okay, I'll start to my right.

Ms.

I actually have one question.

So I think that's an excellent question, Ms.

Turner, and we have such wonderful students and we would love for our students to tutor, but I think the elementary schools get out at 215, 215-ish, and you'll still be in school.

So we'd have to see, and Buford and Walker let out at 315, and you're still in school in high school.

So if we can figure out a way to utilize some of our amazing high school students like yourself, then we would love to do that.

More of a comment and this might speak to our legislative meetings.

I haven't heard anything about this being recurring funding.

This is just a one-time allocation and so I think it would be really great if the state would actually fully fund our public schools so that we wouldn't need these boosts and we could actually fulfill all of our staffing and needs of our schools and our students.

presented without expectation of a response.

And then the focus on Clark, Buford, Walker, great.

I just don't want to lose sight of our students that are low performing at other schools that maybe just get lost in a math equation because there is a larger number of high performing students.

Absolutely.

Mr. Morris.

Quick question in regards to attendance positions.

We need support.

We need support with daily and period attendance at the high school, so we're building out what these positions would look like, but we certainly need support.

Specifically, I think period attendance is more challenging right now.

OK, Ms.

Mossberg.

Yeah, I was wondering about the percentage allocations for the different areas.

Yes, it is.

I'm sorry.

So because it seems like

I don't know if there's any room for flexibility.

It seems like there might be some overlap between literacy and tutoring, for example, and I just don't know exactly why they

You know, why those percentages and particularly, well, I don't know that you can answer that.

It's in the playbook.

It was in it.

I think it also might have been in the press release that Governor Young did.

When Dr. Coons met with superintendents and chief academic officers recently, she shared that it's a guide, the playbook is a guide, it's recommendations, so every single thing in there doesn't have to be like lockstep.

Restrictions, again, there are recommendations.

Recommendations as far as using the high dosage

high impact tutoring and grade level work.

And so we have to balance that out because we are doing interventions.

We're intervening and filling gaps because of the learning loss.

OK.

Yeah, I think probably I'm

You know, just a little bit, tiny bit mistrustful, I guess I would say.

And I guess finally, I'm wondering about the assessment of this program, and is that also determined by the state?

Well, yeah.

Tutoring, attendance, I guess it's just, is it just SOL scores?

It is.

It has not mentioned MAP or DIBELS or any of the other.

We like looking at multiple data points.

but this is based on SOL data for the tutoring piece so of course we're going to be monitoring and taking doing progress monitoring to see how the students are doing.

I assume that I will

need to submit a report in something I read just this week.

It said there's an end of year report.

Usually you do quarterly reports, but this one, what I read, unless I read it incorrectly, it said that there's an end of year report that is due, but we're going to be monitoring the students.

We want to make sure that what we're doing is working and we see growth.

as we're moving through this process.

And if there's something else that the state expects us to submit to to determine the success of the program, then we'll be ready to submit.

OK, thank you.

Ms.

Yeah, I'm perplexed by this proposal from VDOE and I guess I, let me see, how best to my question.

And then they will submit all of the funds or quarterly funds or monthly funds based on what our plan looks like.

I mean are we going to get

So we prioritize all of this.

We know this has already been on our radar before the all-in plan rolled out.

Correct.

I mean, I appreciate the fact that the state wants to provide some more funds for this.

But again, similarly, is this a one-time deal?

Do we get things and energy and time and

You know, for all of our staff to come up with like what's going to work best for these students for this program and then it kind of falls flat.

I mean we've had other grants and programs.

that we roll out and we start and they just kind of peter out for one reason or another, not necessarily our fault.

But I guess I'm concerned just that, you know, for staff time and the investment that, you know, that we're asking of them and then are we going to

I will say one thing I failed to mention is that the funds, we have three years to spend the funds.

The 946 is what we get.

It's what we get.

But we have three years to use it.

The plan that we've submitted uses the funds within two years.

So a large majority of it will, if we find the people, I mean it's the employees, the staffing that would take the largest chunk of our money, personnel.

So if we find the people to do this work, then we'd use a large chunk of that this year and then we'll continue the work next year as we will have additional funds left for next year.

But what I understand is once these funds are depleted,

then they are depleted.

And I think to Dr. Odey's point that while someone listening to this presentation may say, well, they're getting almost a million dollars.

I mean, when you're talking about people and if people are watching our budget development process,

Large portions of budgets are salaries so that $946,000 can be depleted really quickly.

and that's why, as Dr. Odey mentioned, I mean, realistically speaking, if we're able to staff this and staff it correctly, then this money would only last us two years.

And I also want to say that, I mean, we are really accentuating the positive with what we already have.

So our goal is not to tax our staff currently,

So we don't want to throw something else on them.

So we really are looking at what's working well and seeing how we can just supplement what's happening.

But there are some new aspects.

There are some new aspects that we have added to the plan with the afterschool and tapping into some of our community resources.

But it really is trying to just take the money and just support

Yeah, and I mean, I appreciate the fact that we're trying to tap into to who's already working in the schools, but I feel like they're there for a certain purpose.

And they already can't provide probably enough for kids say who might be on the waiting list to try and get into some of the after school programs.

You know, I mean, I'm thinking about transportation.

Visiting a week or two ago, I was in a couple of schools and just chatting with one of the

principals about what this might look in that setting and when do you provide those services?

And I realize that each school is different, but you know.

You know, what was being discussed was maybe 15 minutes here, 15 minutes there.

And I'm like, how can that even make an impact really by the time you get a student and are you pulling them or are you pushing in or what are they missing out on?

And it just feels really hard.

Something that was very clear in the playbook, and I believe when Dr. Koons met with us, was that it could not take the place of other content areas.

So we're not going to pull them out of tier one instruction to do this tutoring.

We're not going to do it during live art, music, PE, lunch or recess.

It has to be a specific time.

So it's during our intervention time that we already have if it's happening during the day, during that wind block that's already happening.

And so that's why some schools are looking at, OK, we need a little bit more.

So we're going to try to do the after school and or the Saturday as well.

So I appreciate the principals' creativity and working with their teams to try to figure out how it would look in their schools.

We hear about this after school has already started, after schedules are already made, but we've got folks who are like, I'm going to do what's best for the kids.

I'm going to do what's best for my students.

And so what is, how are we going to support our families if say, if at Buford, it's an early morning or an afterschool type of situation that we're proposing as far as transportation.

So the good news for Walker and Buford is that they already have activity buses in the afternoon.

So we'd be able to utilize that for them for after school.

No school said they were going to do morning.

So that has not been, I presented it as an option.

I threw that in there.

So Walker and Buford have bus transportation after school.

There's no issue there.

We do have four elementary schools who said they need transportation, said they want to do after school tutoring.

And so truly transportation would be needed.

Clark is one of those.

Clark, Johnson, Jackson, Bya, and Burnham Moran.

So we're working.

I've been

talking with Kim and we're putting our heads together to figure it out.

You know, of course, some parents may be able to get their kids and we'd ask if you can, please do that.

So just out of curiosity, along transportation lines, so let's just pick Clark since they're on the list.

Well, we're looking at third and fourth graders at Clark.

I can't give you a number right now, but I would imagine it's a large number for Clark.

that if we're looking at not proficient and at risk, so the students that did not pass and the students that got between a 400 and a 447, it's a large majority of Clark that we would look at.

So that is why

I mentioned that we need to prioritize those students that actually did not pass.

And even those ones that just barely made it with a 402 or 405 because we don't want them to slide back.

So I'll work with Ms.

Johnson to see exactly how many students.

Once she communicates, we have not communicated and invited yet, but once she has her list and is ready to communicate with parents, then we, well we need the transportation in place before that happens, but we will be looking at that.

And we're running our little bus, our new little buses.

Ms.

How many students does the little bus hold? 14.

OK, thank you.

Okay, my question came to me.

It's a few, like one, a couple questions in one.

But we're talking about the after school tutoring possibly or during the school.

I remember we talked about this before some years back, I don't know if you were here, but we were doing after school tutoring and teachers were doing extra hours to do the teaching.

And the question came up,

about the length of the day for the students and the teachers, but also the idea that instead of taxing the teachers more, why don't we find companies that do tutoring services?

Not that we don't want the teachers to do it, but looking into other resources to say, these are people, this is their job to do this tutoring.

I believe you may be referencing EBL that was, I think it was closing out as I came in, early bridges to learning or something like that.

There is not an appetite from our schools to utilize tutoring programs because they're not necessarily using the

The plans, the format of teaching and learning that we use in our schools.

So it is a request to start with our teachers, start with our folks that know how we teach reading, that know how we teach math, and if necessary, to pull in outside tutors.

I am with you.

I'm just worried about people burning out and the resources that we have spread out across all the schools.

We're talking about Buford and Walker.

And was it Clark that we're going to get a special focus?

I just wonder about the staffs at those schools and how much capacity they have.

And the students too.

So I would say UVA students, that's one that they really are interested in, because often they're our student teachers, they're our practicum students, they're in our classrooms, they see the teaching and learning that's happening, they've seen our reading specialists at work, our math specialists,

So that's sort of a secondary, if our teachers can't do this work, then look at UVA tutors.

Of course, if none of that pans out, I will certainly return to the principals and say,

You know, I often get these emails from this tutoring company.

I often get these emails from that tutoring company.

And the DOE is recommending this possible tutoring company.

So it won't, it's not gone as an option.

It's just sort of on standby.

From reading that playbook, the high impact, what I what I recall it saying is that's the grade level work that they're saying the students would need.

We often are filling gaps because there are they are there.

And so that's what intervention is to help bring the student back up to their grade level.

And so the high impact, the state is recommending that we include high impact tutoring so that students are

not only receiving intervention, but also getting that grade level work during tutoring.

They already get it during tier one instruction.

Tier one instruction is about grade level work.

The intervention is about what are you missing in your learning?

And so let's try to get you back here.

And so based on the research that the state has done, that high impact tutoring is what they're hoping that we can include.

Not to belabor you, Dr. Odey, but pretty much most of my concerns or questions have already been presented.

I just have one question under attendance.

You all are proposing two attendance positions and because we know chronic absenteeism is 10% of this project.

So what would be the role of

So because it's only 10% and so 10% of that 946,000 is 94,000.

So it would not be able to pay for two positions.

We feel like it could contribute to a portion of it or pay one, you know, or a portion of it.

But we're still building out and planning that committee is working through what this is going to look like, the campaign,

all of that, but we know that we may want these positions to do after school attendance recovery sessions or home visits or assessing student needs.

There's a

quite a bit that they could do.

That some of our social workers are already doing some of this work.

So this would just be in addition because we know that we have some of our schools are more have a higher chronic absenteeism than others.

We have some challenges before us.

Thank you.

Sorry.

So nice to see everyone.

Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to talk about our ESL program and our multilingual learners in Charlottesville City.

I wanted to first point out that as we serve our multilingual learners in different capacities, we see aspects of that woven throughout the strategic plan.

And so definitely we focus on increasing academic achievement, especially when we're talking about

when we're talking about reading and math, specifically looking at our membership, student membership groups.

But we also see within priority two where we're talking about providing a culture of safety, wellness, and belonging.

One of the things I talked to you all about last year, and I'll bring that back, is having the Welcome Center here, so a place for our families to come when they first come to the country and learn about our schools and learn about the registration process.

And then with priority three, we've been working with our instructional coaches, and I'll talk more about that with SIOP training.

And then priority four is where transportation goes, right?

So I will discuss a little bit about last year and this year in terms of where we are with transportation.

So I will give you a big picture overview first, and then we'll spend some time looking at our enrollment changes as well as our staffing changes.

and then we'll be more specific looking at the English language proficiency data that we report to the state and chronic absenteeism specifically with our English learners, adjustments and enhancements that we're working on this year and then next steps.

So big picture in Charlottesville City Schools, we have students speaking over 39 different languages with our five most common listed there.

So Spanish, Pashto, Dari,

Arabic and Swahili and then you'll notice in terms of where our families are coming from our largest portion right now is Afghanistan and that's our Pashto and our Dari speakers so depending on what region of Afghanistan they come they speak one of those two languages and then many of our English learners were born in the United States and are bilingual and are learning or are learning English as when they come to school and then our next our other two countries that we're seeing more families come from

are Honduras and El Salvador and Central America and then also Syria.

Many of our new refugees have been coming from Syria.

And so you saw this last year and I will say that the first year I presented we had a very, very sharp increase because that was the fall of 2021 when Afghanistan fell and we received

many new refugees from Afghanistan.

From last year to this year, while the increase is certainly not slowing, you can see it's a little bit more consistent in terms of our numbers.

And I'll talk a little bit more specifically about those numbers.

But I did, I did want to talk to you about how

With our numbers growing and thinking about our schools, we sometimes get the question about like, what are we doing to catch these students up, right?

And I think it's a little bit, that's not the right question we should be asking because our students come to us with an incredible funds of knowledge and incredible gifts and interesting stories and things that can really benefit our community.

And so I have a picture there for you of,

At Jackson Via a few weeks ago, they had Rocktoberfest and

Many of our Afghan families, they set up a cricket field in the back and they were teaching other families and other students how to play cricket.

And so that's just one example.

But there's multiple examples you're seeing in our schools about having our students and our families really bringing and sharing about their culture and sharing about their families.

And I think that's just something we need to keep in mind because we have a goal in schools to help all students be successful and graduate

but we also have to think about all that they bring to us at that moment too and not let that part get forgotten.

So I did want to point out also that when I talk about our English learners in Charlottesville City Schools, I'm talking about our students who are within our ESL program.

So that's students that have tested into our program that need support in developing their English.

and that's about 16% right now.

But if you take a step back and you look at all of our students who are multilingual, that's closer to about 900 students.

And so that's students who are bilingual, students who exited the program, students who didn't need our supports.

And that's a little bit closer to 20% of our population.

So again, I think that that's an important number to be thinking about when you walk into our schools and you see the diversity there.

So with our enrollment changes, this shows our staffing changes over the last few years.

And I want to pause and say a thank you to all of you because I see you in the fall and present and then the budget process happens.

And so last year,

In the budget we had three more ESL teachers added.

The year before we had two more.

And you can see we're not quite matching with how many more students, but it's really making things possible in terms of supporting our schools and supporting our students.

So thank you very much for that.

I think I mentioned before that we try to keep about a 30 to one student to teacher ratio within our schools.

And then

Just be thinking about how that 30 to one ratio is to help support students' language development, but it also helps support the students as they're working on that grade level content.

Especially as we get into the secondary level, the expectations are the same for our English learners as for any other student.

And so we are both helping them build their language skills, but also introducing them to the grade level content.

This next slide gets a little bit more in detail.

So you can see at the top, the schools are listed in blue with the August enrollment of this year, and then our October enrollment, which was when I turned this presentation in.

And the pending enrollments are our families that we know about.

We've been working on registration enrollment documents.

They might not have been screened yet and fully in our ESL program.

and that number obviously this was two weeks ago that number has shifted a little bit and then you can see our total so in October 19th when I pulled this number we had 699

And when I turned this in last week, we had about 720 that we know about.

But as of today, there's seven more students that I found out about from last week to this week.

So you can see that even though the beginning of the school year started in August, we continue to enroll students throughout the school year.

So these numbers are never static.

They continue to change.

The darker red,

are the schools, so under the total, the darker red are the schools with the yellow highlighted growth sections where I am a little bit concerned when I'm looking at our numbers because as our numbers grow and we're looking at our staffing

We want to make sure that we have enough staffing for them.

And the three positions that we added last year, we added this year, we had a split position between Jackson-Baya and Johnson.

So you can see they both have two full-time people there.

You can imagine 1.5 with 70 students would be overwhelming.

So we did a good job there in terms of thinking where we needed the support.

We added a position at Buford, so they only had two teachers last year, and then we added a position at CHS because they had five last year.

So I think that we are continuing to add positions in the right places.

My concern is as our numbers continue to grow, we have to think about more staffing.

So I'm going to shift a little bit from enrollment in terms of where, and then talk a little bit about the students that we have.

How are they doing in terms of building their language development?

Where are we seeing some really good strengths?

Where do we need to continue to work?

And so this English language proficiency data comes from a test called the access test.

And that test is taken in the spring, so January to March.

And then the state has a comparison.

The state gives us a set level of

what progress looks like, and it looks different at different grade levels, it looks different at different proficiency levels, right?

So a student who's brand new in the younger grades is probably going to move a little bit quicker than a student who's brand new at the older grades because the content is not as difficult.

And so you can see, I think it's always good to think about where we were before COVID.

So you can see in 2018, 2019,

L Progress, 59% of our English learners were making adequate progress based on this.

So again, this is from their year before score compared to their current year.

And the state's average was 57%.

So we are right there with the state.

And then after COVID, there was a big dip.

And this dip happened because we were not in school, right?

And so our students were continuing to work on their first language.

But the access to school online really made it difficult for students to be able to have practice talking, have practice listening,

Writing, surprisingly, we saw a little bit of an increase with our students because they were using their writing skills a little bit more.

But there was a big dip here in Charlottesville.

There was a big dip across the state in terms of students not making adequate progress.

And so since 2020, we've been slowly building back up.

And so our scores from last year, so our 2022 to 2023 comparison scores, 49 percent of our English learners were making adequate progress.

And that's right where the state's average was as well.

It's not at the 52%, which is what our progress target is.

And that's set by the federal government that the state gives us.

And those numbers were set previous to COVID with the expectation that schools will continue to have their progress continue until it's at 58%.

Once we hit 58%, the expectation is you'd hang out.

I thought it would be interesting to take a look at by grade where our students are, so I'll give you a second to look at that.

and you'll see that highlighted in that dull yellow.

So in fifth grade are instances where our Charlottesville City Schools percentages met or exceeded the state progress of 52%.

And then highlighted in the bright yellow are where our Charlottesville City Schools percentages exceeded the states.

And then bright yellow and bold is where we both exceeded the state's percentages and we met the progress.

And I want to give a little moment to our fourth graders.

So our fourth graders last year, so our current fifth grade English learners, 86% of them made progress according to the state.

But remember, that's a progress range.

So when we actually looked at our fourth grade scores, every single one of them scored higher than the year before.

So if you know some fifth grade English learners, give them a high five.

When we go to our secondary,

You'll see, again, we've got the bright yellow is where our Charlottesville City Schools percentages exceeded the states and the bold is where they both exceeded the states and met the state progress goal.

So we're doing a lot of good work, but there's room for improvement as well.

One thing I wanted to address, and you saw this both on the slide before and on this slide, is the not counted column.

And the not counted column is our students who are newcomers.

Because what happens is that's the first year they've taken the test.

We won't get their growth results until the second year.

So for some of them, that's a year and a half after they've been in the country.

And that makes it really hard for a division like Charlottesville because

We have a lot of newcomers who come often, so students who have been in the country for 12 months or less.

join our schools.

And so for example, between January, this group of Not Counted, they usually came in between January of last year until August.

And that was 74% of them scored as level one.

And so what happens then is we spend a lot of our resources, a lot of our time in our schools supporting those students, right?

Because they need the most support.

We don't have a way that the state measures their progress until they're in schools for a year and a half.

So I think that that's really important for us to remember that there's a lot of really good work happening in our schools that is not showing up on this report.

This next slide talks about the chronic absenteeism by school.

And the total at the top is what you saw in the presentation a month ago.

with Carolyn Swift.

And then I looked specifically at our English learners, where their percentages fell.

And then I also gave you total English learners in the schools last year.

So you can kind of think about what that number looks like.

And so when you look at this, you can see that there's a difference at Greenbriar, at Jackson-Byatt, at Venable, and to some degree at Charlottesville.

You can see a big jump.

the other schools I don't see as big of a difference.

In terms of what we're doing to continue to support our teachers and our schools, one of the things I'm most excited about is working with the instructional coaches this year.

So Dr. Anna Eisele and I have been working with the instructional coaches and the Center for Applied Linguistics.

We have a trainer, she's come twice now, she comes this Monday and she'll come one more time, so a four-day training to bring PSY up.

to our instructional coaches.

And the ideas behind PSYOP are pretty simple.

It's that we are taking grade level content and we are thinking about language objectives at the same time.

And so our language objectives might vary depending on the proficiency level of the students.

But if we think about language and we think about how students use language in terms of reading, writing, speaking, and listening in our content, and we're a little more cognizant and thoughtful in our lessons,

Then we can really help support our English language learners.

So this year, we're spending a lot of time with the instructional coaches.

We also have had several ESL teachers either have refresher trainings with SIEP or do some state level video we trainings that they've provided and will be planning this spring.

ways that we can continue to build out capacity of all of our teachers.

And so we're interested in more of a division-wide PSYOP training for all of our teachers.

However, already, even in our September professional learning, we had instructional coaches teach PSYOP strategies.

And I imagine that will continue to happen in the next two professional learning as well.

So that's one thing I'm really excited about.

We've gotten some really good feedback about the training.

and I think it will do a lot of good.

And then the last thing I just want us to remember is the district level welcome center that we currently have at the annex.

There's a lot of conversations about space and as we're thinking about Walker and Buford and offices in the annex, I wanna just make sure we continue to think about where will the welcome center end up as all of those things shift around.

In terms of next step, I already touched a little bit about PSYOP training for CCS teachers.

I'll continue to put in budget requests for the following year as our numbers continue to grow.

Ongoing support for Charlottesville City Schools Welcome Center.

And then we also have to start thinking about how we'll support language development at KTEC because previous to when currently Albemarle supports a language development at KTEC.

So there's a teacher there who supports both Albemarle students

and Charlottesville City students who are in the program and are English learners.

KTEC has been a really incredible program for a lot of our English learners.

They made with success over there.

So we want to continue to think about how we can support that well.

And that is it.

Well, thank you so much for this very detailed report.

I'll start here to my left.

Ms.

Yeah, thank you, sir.

So I was just curious if we look back at the, I guess, the secondary proficiency data slide at the 10th and the 12th grade levels.

So I was just curious like why

Honestly, I think at the 12th grade for the students, it doesn't quite matter anymore, right?

They're graduating.

They don't need to exit the program because that's not a requirement for graduation.

They need to focus on their classes.

So my guess is at both levels, it's not a priority for students quite as much.

It is a grade level band.

So the students take a ninth through 12th grade and

and then a six through eight.

So sometimes I think you can see a drop, you can't see them on the same slide, but C6 is 31% and then it moves up 46 and 58 because they're taking the same assessment as their language.

So I think it's a little bit easier for students in that same band.

Thank you.

That makes sense.

And then regarding the Welcome Center beyond space, like how many people are you guys seeing?

And what else can we do?

It's a busy place.

No, I don't think we need to I don't there's nothing we need right now.

I think we just need to think about and I don't know the answer where

I don't know all of the pieces in terms of who will be at Walker and what will happen, who will be at the annex.

Does the annex need to turn into classrooms at some point?

I'm not sure.

But so I just want to make sure that we can, we share a space down there, which is fine.

And I don't think that has been a problem.

We've been able to see the families we need to buy appointment.

So that hasn't been an issue.

Yes, so Sherry Stewart, who works with family engagement, she does a lot of our assessments and brings families in.

And then Annette Kaufman Horner, who works in a couple of different varieties, a couple of different places as an administrative assistant.

Part of her job is paid for with Title III to help support, once families are in, all of the different pieces we do.

It's everyone.

None of us are there full time.

I think so.

I think there's always room for growth.

We have had we had a family of six come in last week.

And so with that family, they were in four different schools.

It's much easier for us to put everything together and send it to the schools than to try to

each school organized separately.

And then one more question.

There was a pretty significant drop.

And let me see which school had a big drop.

I don't know if it was Walker.

Oh, in numbers?

Walker had

Lots of sixth graders last year.

I think they were at more like 120 at the end of last year and they all went to Buford, which is why we added a third position at Buford.

So Buford's numbers were lower.

So I know that was part of it.

Well, thank you for a wonderful presentation.

And, you know, I think you've answered a lot of my questions in the presentation and I also feel like anecdotally just looking around in the different schools there's a lot of really positive things going on for these kids.

Seems like we're doing a lot of good work.

and there seem like there's a lot of happy kids in our schools and it's really very sweet.

I think they would.

The way that SOLs work for English learners is their very first year they're in the country for English, for reading, they can be exempt.

So our newcomers, that first year they come, if they're in third through eighth grade, not at the secondary level, they can basically take a pass.

They are exempt.

So my guess is we probably wouldn't focus on newcomers, but I think it's probably a school by school basis.

But then after that first year and for science and math, they're required to take the SOL every time.

So we do have their scores.

OK, yeah, so I guess we'll just see.

I think I would say that there are lots of English learners that it would benefit, but I think the schools will probably be really careful about thinking about

Okay, and just one other question.

I haven't seen

Yeah, I think probably the biggest thing that I would be really excited about is having a permanent time.

So right now, we sort of fit it in when we can, both with our three jobs and with the

with the capacity of the annex right now.

So I would say in my dreams, it could be consistently open, maybe not Monday through Friday, but consistently open so that families could walk in because our families do walk into schools pretty frequently and our schools are wonderful and help them as much as they can.

And sometimes they'll just stay and register at the schools or sometimes they'll call over and that can be a little hard if we can't help them at that moment.

So I would say that piece.

And then the other thing that when we started thinking about the Welcome Center, one thing that we've really wanted to do and we haven't done yet is bring in more family engagement work.

And so working with Bianca and working with the family engagement team to bring in different activities and ways for families to be involved because

some of our families are, they're hesitant to come into our schools because they really trust that our schools, a lot of them really trust that our schools are doing what they need to and they don't, in a lot of other cultures there's less of a, there's a little bit more of a separation and so we want our families to feel really comfortable in our schools and so that's another way I'd like to be able to see it done is where we have opportunities to bring families either here or to other schools and we can help

Yeah, I'm just thinking down the road a little bit that this might be a really nice opportunity for a community partner or two to help support this.

That's a good idea.

Because I think there probably would be people in the community that would be interested in something like this to make it a really lovely welcoming center with some services for these families.

That's a great idea.

Thank you.

Ms.

Morris-Purple.

Ms.

Morris, Ms.

I appreciate the two-pager that you uploaded as well.

Thank you.

I'm wondering if on, I guess it's that, no, sorry, don't change the slide.

No, this one is good.

Yeah, it's just, if there's like one more column, I'm interested in like the end of year number.

For students, because when we see the net change either up or down, I think it would be helpful to know

I mean, that's a year over year change, but like who is exiting, like who's left either level four, you know, exited ELL service or who has moved away from Charlottesville?

Like, is that plus 36 at CHS, 36 new kids, or is it more than 36 because we ended up

Yeah, we were talking about that number actually with what's on the screen there.

We were talking about the 218 in August and then it drops to 212 and then we're back to 216.

There's a lot of things happening, right?

There's both students leaving and students coming.

So to us, it's like, oh, my goodness, we've had 15 new kids.

But on this chart, it doesn't look like that, right?

Because we had however many transfer from the county.

I have this same, the document I uploaded for you all, I have that in April because we follow when we do a big state report with the numbers in the September 30th and then April, we do the same thing.

Yeah, and in April, maybe it comes to us just as a written report or something.

Yeah, there's a lot of moving pieces, but I think that we could also look at

Yeah, where are the students going?

Is it an exit?

So I can play around.

And maybe what we can do as a on our board wrap up, just as one of our action items.

So when you do the report in April,

Give you a little bit of time, of course, but then maybe in May, or maybe in June, because if you're submitting it at the end of the month in April, there may be a board meeting, depending on how the month ends.

May may be the next day.

So maybe in June.

So, I mean, so what we can do is in June, it could be a written report.

Okay.

All right, thank you, Dr. Faust, again, for this great report.

And it's happening to hear that our students are continuing to grow and excited about school.

And we're bouncing back from the pandemic.

And parents are excited about our children attending Charleston City Schools, and we're growing.

All right, next we will have Stacy Riedel.

Good evening, board chair, members of the board, and Dr. Gurley.

I'm thrilled to be here tonight in my capacity as the literacy coordinator.

Tonight, I will share updates on our literacy data, the implications, and what has been put into practice.

This presentation will include three perspectives or lenses with which to analyze our data.

First, we explore the kindergarten to second grade literacy data from VLP, the Virginia Literacy Partnership.

also formerly known as PALS.

This data is from the spring 2019 to spring 2023 testing windows and shows us the impact of COVID on our learners.

Next, we will look at our current cohort data from the fall 2023 literacy data for kinder to second grade.

And finally, the third data set we will look at this evening is from the MAP assessment for our fourth through eighth graders.

After looking at the various data, we will talk about what we are doing now and what we will continue to do in the future to support our students in literacy.

First, it's important to know that this data and information does connect directly to our strategic plan goals and targets.

This data will help us to measure and ensure that our learners will demonstrate mastery and reading through rigorous, inclusive, and relevant learning experiences, which will equip them for graduation and future plans.

Most notably, I hope to show you that we are moving in the right direction towards targets 9 and 12, which states that we will increase reading achievement and early literacy for all students to at least 75% proficiency across all student membership groups.

Okay, let's talk data.

This will take us a little bit of time, and I'm going to talk for a little bit, but I want to make sure that I help you best understand everything.

The data you're looking at here is provided to us from the VLP.

The PALS assessment currently serves as Virginia's state-supported literacy screener for kindergarten, first and second grade.

The PALS benchmark reports help teachers, administrators and families understand their students' established and emergent literacy competencies.

The PALS benchmark reports are useful snapshots of student performance.

They are not growth measures.

However, benchmark reports that compare multiple years of PALS data can help us to understand the trends in below benchmark rates over time, as well as for specific grade levels in student demographic groups.

Multi-year comparisons also help reveal the evolving effects of COVID-19 on literacy development.

On the top table, it's important to know that we want these bars to be small.

They show the percentage of students that did not meet the PALS benchmark.

The first bar on the left shows that in the spring of 2019, 24% of our kindergarten to second graders combined did not meet the PALS benchmark.

That is our pre-COVID data.

When we returned from the pandemic, there was a drastic increase in the number of students below benchmark.

As you can see in the spring of 2022, because of all of our hard work, we reduced the percentage of students not meeting the benchmark to almost pre-pandemic levels.

We continue that trajectory and increased achievement even more last year.

So we've just looked at the overall performance, and now with the graph on the bottom, we can zoom in a little bit more to get some more information.

PALS now reports the data using performance bands.

The red bands are designated as high risk.

These are the students that did not meet the minimum benchmark on the assessment and will receive explicit intervention and support.

Yellow is labeled as medium risk and represents the scores that are at or about 10 points above the benchmark.

While all of the students in the yellow did meet the PALS benchmark, we know that students need to do more than just meet the benchmark.

The students in yellow band also receive additional support in their classroom.

The green designates low risk for the students that exceeded the benchmark scores.

A celebration to note is that our teachers have increased achievement from 2019 to 2023 as evidenced by the growth in the green section.

We're actually exceeding the percentage of students in that band from our pre-COVID data.

This graph has a lot of information.

Here, we have an analysis of the change in our first grade PALS data from 2019 to 2023.

This is not a cohort report.

On the previous slide, we discussed the total percentage of students that were identified as high risk or red.

Now, we're gonna look even closer at who those students are that were in the red.

If you look first at the light blue bar all the way on the left in each category, it's hard to believe it, but this is the first grade data from our current sixth graders.

24% of that class was high risk in the spring of first grade.

Of that 24%, we can see that half of those students were students of color and over 60% were students with disabilities.

The inequities of academic achievement were present then, and it grew even more disparagingly from COVID.

The dark blue bars represent our current fourth graders when they returned from the pandemic and were in first grade.

Not only were more students identified as high risk, but the inequities were even greater.

This reiterates the importance of early intervention and literacy instruction, which you can see by the decrease of high-risk students identified in 2022, the teal, and again in the 2023, the purple.

We still have work to do to support our students as they build their foundational literacy skills and address the inequities of our performance, but we're on the right path.

When we're looking at the data to truly understand our performance, it is nice to look at some cohort information.

It's also a little challenging because this cohort has changed a lot, as you can see from the enrollment numbers.

Another challenge is that PALS is not a growth measure.

Its purpose is to identify students at risk of reading difficulties.

And keep in mind that the kindergarten PALS is very different from the one to three PALS.

This data represents our current third graders.

When they started in kindergarten in the 2020-2021 school year, there were 155 students total.

Of those 155 kindergarten students, we see the three performance bands.

By spring, we had enrolled 41 more students and drastically increased our low-risk students.

When that same cohort began in first grade, their numbers had increased another 49 students, and we had 245 first graders.

Now in the spring of second grade, the group has 303 students.

With all the enrollment changes and growth in this cohort, I want to highlight that there was a decrease in red from the fall of first grade to spring of second grade.

At the same time, we're moving students from the high risk group to the some risk group because of the additional interventions and instruction in their classrooms.

Okay, that was the lens of looking at spring 2023 PALS data.

Now let's shift to this school year and let's look at our fall 23 PALS.

This is our current second grade class and shows us some of how they're performing right now.

The goal here is to see more blue than yellow.

When we look at student achievement, we really have to look at the performance of our marginalized students.

We measure the impact of our instructional practices by the student performance and continue to align student needs with instruction.

Principals, teachers, instructional coaches, ESL teachers, reading specialists, everybody pays attention to our gaps and continues to refine our science-based literacy instruction to ensure that it's culturally responsive.

Our current first graders have similar data to second grade.

The data point that is most noticeable is that only 9% of our white students were below the benchmark compared to the 41% of our black and brown students.

We have to own this and we have to continue our work with evidence-based literacy instruction and do better.

Our awareness, continued progress monitoring, and professional learning supports this work going forward.

When you look at this graph of our current kindergarten students, you'll notice that there's a lot of blue.

Part of that is due to the nature of the kindergarten PALS.

The benchmark's a little bit low, and it's not really comparable to that first grade PALS.

Nevertheless, the data's showing, and we've noticed anecdotally from many teachers, that this kindergarten group of students are starting this school year with more kindergarten readiness skills intact than we've seen

in many years recently.

Yet still you can see that the literacy gaps are still present even at the very beginning of kindergarten.

Now we move from PALS to map data for our fourth through eighth graders.

Ms.

Swift has already presented this data to you, so I'll be a little brief.

Remember when you look at this graph, the yellow star represents the projected achievement for that grade based on their previous year's performance.

The height of the blue bar represents their actual achievement.

So for example, the current fourth graders were projected to grow 10.4 points based on their third grade performance, but they actually grew 12 points.

The only grade that did not meet their projected growth goal was fifth grade.

Seventh and eighth grade significantly exceeded their growth projections.

Just something to keep in mind once we begin to look at our upper elementary and middle school data.

We notice that the projected growth goals sometimes appear smaller.

For example, fourth grade had that goal of 10.4 compared to eighth grades, 4.1.

This is a very normal trend in any population of older students.

All of our upper grades are showing growth in literacy skills, and this is another celebration in our data.

Here's another way to look at the same data.

I want to point out that the bolded scores represent instances where a cohort has exceeded the national mean.

This means this helps us to better understand the strengths of our individual cohorts and forecast grade level performance on SOL assessments.

In this case, this is really good news.

Two cohorts of particular interest are current fourth and fifth graders.

They were virtual for kindergarten and first grade.

And we know that those are formative times in their literacy development.

Teachers and schools have been leveraging on grade level content as well as accelerating unfinished learning for these students.

And you can see here that their hard work and efforts are supporting the growth of these students as they are now surpassing the national mean.

Whew, that was a lot of information.

Let's take a look at what we're doing now based on the data.

First, we know that a huge impact of literacy program has been aligning the work we do with science-based reading research.

This will allow us to meet the requirements of the Virginia Literacy Act, the VLA, as well as support the literacy needs of our students.

I want to take a quick moment and thank you, the board, for your continued support with letters.

We have been fortunate to provide several cohorts and opportunities to our staff over the past years.

At this time, I'm pleased to share we have 136 total CCS staff that have either completed or are enrolled in letters one.

That's really impressive.

If we dig into the number and look a little more closely at our teachers in the primary grades, we know that 86% of our teachers have completed or currently in it.

We have had a few new teachers this year in those grade levels, but there's high interest in wanting another cohort to start so they can join.

I also include the fact that we currently have 31 CCS staff members that have completed or are currently enrolled in Letters II.

As our staff are finishing up with the letters one, we kept hearing that they wanted to take the time to use that information, put it into practice, and then pursue letters two.

So there's a small delay in that.

But there's been a lot of people reaching out asking when we can start another letters to cohort.

Letters is just one of the many ways we're aligning our understanding and implementation of evidence-based literacy instruction that's grounded in the science of reading and CCS.

At the start of the school year, every reading specialist for Charlottesville schools and the elementary schools attended a two-day reading institute with the VLP and the VDOE.

At this event, it was affirming to know that we are prepared for the implementation of the VLA in the fall.

of next school year.

For example, we're already using state approved tier one curriculum materials.

Additionally, we've used them enough that we know how to navigate our way through them to make sure that our instruction and materials align to the students needs.

Also at the VLP Institute, we learned about the value series, which is a professional learning series.

The reading specialists are going to complete that with the lens of like a train the trainer, and then they're providing the information and instruction to our teachers and our staff.

The VLA will require explicit professional learning to build or grow the capacity of teachers, and that's what we're already implementing.

However, we aren't focused on just our primary grades in Charlottesville.

The VLA is expanding to include grades four through eight.

We're already exploring some options for courses similar to letters, but it's more aligned with the upper grade student.

In addition, we have some personalized professional learning happening at Walker and Buford.

The Walker ELA teams have partnered with Dr. Conrady from William & Mary and Dr. Levitt from UVA.

Buford's ELA teams have partnered with Dr. Dubay from James Madison.

Together these teams and the consultants are focused on the acceleration of reading achievement through high quality tier one instruction.

We're also excited that the format or structure of the writing SOL has changed and it now aligns with our instruction on how students learn.

The integrated reading and writing assessment allows us to teach these skills together instead of in isolation.

Finally, one of the areas of the VLA that we're most looking forward to implementing is the partnership and the resource bank for our families.

When a family asks, how can I help my kids learn how to read?

We want to have an answer.

We want to have a bank of resources and ideas that we can easily and readily share with them.

The state and the VLP are both building a resource and we're exploring ways to communicate and share that information with our community.

Sorry.

It's a very exciting time in literacy.

Thanks to your support, the amazing team of specialists and teachers, and the forward thinking of Stephanie Tatel, we're in a really good place.

Thank you for your time.

Thank you so much for this wonderful report.

I'll start to my right, Ms.

Um, the presentation was really good.

It's cool just seeing like the data for like everything and like, just just really cool seeing it.

Um, I had one question.

This is really speculatory.

So I'm sorry.

But um, do you think that for like, why one

My one percentage of students not meeting the goals in a certain race is higher than another.

Definitely our kindergarten data showing that there's already inequities.

It does kind of let us know that there's something, but we do a lot of early intervention.

Thank you for the presentation.

I just had one question.

When we're looking at the data and seeing the, you know, the growth or the SOL, the benchmarks, is that telling us that students are on grade level for their literacy?

Is that what the percentage tells us?

So when we're looking at it, is that the translation or is it just gross?

Like, does that mean they're on grade level when it shows how many, like we're in the blue and that's good?

It definitely means that student is at low risk of being of needing extra supports.

It means they're with the regular instruction we're providing in tier one.

They're probably meeting expectations.

They could actually be above or below like slightly below.

There is a range in there, but we just know that with the supports were putting it in place, they should not need additional help.

Well, you really rock this.

Thank you so much.

And I just was wondering, I guess kind of piggybacking on Ms.

Turner's question, are we able to distinguish data from the students who have been through our preschool program?

I guess looking at the more at-risk students who

I do think that is information I could definitely pull and put together because we have we do have PALS data from pre-K and then we would have others.

So it would just be a very like

I can tell you're a data person.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

And anyway, and thank you for stepping on board with this.

Thank you.

Nice to meet you.

Glad to have you here.

And I think along the lines of Dr. Craft's question, I think before when we had maybe some of the preschool crew up, we had asked or I had asked to please because there is that new pre pre K screener, that we track them as a cohort out of curiosity to just kind of see, again,

Aligned with what she's saying, you know, the interventions that we're providing to that group.

Definitely.

We can pull that the window just closed for pre-K.

So the data is just now coming in and being available to us to look at.

Yeah, and it's not anything that I'm asking for right now.

I mean, just over time, but I would love to keeping that lens.

Yeah, please.

No, and at the conference and at my conference on Monday, the VDOE did, the State Department did make sure that they established their support for the letters training for teachers.

But

Yeah, I just know that that's a big shake up sometimes when we're we're switching gears.

And I feel like we've got I mean, I don't know that HMH is the best thing, but I think it's got enough good things.

Yeah, we know it enough.

It's a comprehensive program, but we know it enough now that we know the pieces that are really valuable for tier one and what we need for tier two.

We know how to use the different parts.

And it took us a little bit to figure all of that out, but now we've got a firm grip on it.

And then just out of curiosity, I mean, say we get to the high school level and we have students who

Whether they've been identified with an IEP or having other needs, I'm not sure, but are struggling readers.

You know, some, some students say reading at a third or fourth grade level.

I mean, what, what are we doing for those students here?

We do.

We have the 612 literacy specialist, Jen Analiette.

She is working with all the teachers.

We also have the reading specialists here and they're really looking at the strat, like what interventions exactly are to put into place to support those kids.

And

Katie has been great.

She has talked about like this group needs really intensive.

I'm going to pull and I'm going to use sips or I'm going to use a different thing.

I'm going to build their decoding.

But then she's also pushing into the classrooms and helping them in their classroom setting.

Yeah, so I mean, I just think there's so many kids who probably fall through the cracks a little bit once they get out of Buford and into the high school.

So any support or any ideas that we can do to support you all with that?

I'd love to hear that.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Thank you.

We'd like to have one quick question.

Looking at the current first grade cohort,

The percentage of students who are below and above benchmark, I'm just not a math person.

For an example, 41% of black students are below benchmark in the current first grade cohort.

And I'd have to look exactly.

I don't have the number off the top of my head, but it's not as many as you think because it's 41 percent of those identified.

So if you think back, I believe it's 24 percent or 28 percent.

26% are the ones identified as below.

Out of that 26%, 41% of them are students of color.

Okay, that's okay.

Yeah, it's just the disparities.

One more thing, I'm sorry.

Regarding the resources and talking about expanding resources, I know that there's a lot of outside groups like City of Promise, I think holds a reading support group.

And then as we're talking about the all in

We've and we've had conversations I can't

I can only speak to one conversation this school year, but I know we've talked about what professional development and training could look like for their staff so that they're at least doing some of what we what we're doing.

Thank you.

All right, next.

We will have Miss Powell

Good evening, Chairman Bryant, members of the board, and Dr. Gurley.

I actually have, I feel, some of the best news we've had in a while regarding transportation to share with you this evening.

So by the numbers where we were on October 24th, this is the last time I got a comprehensive data set from the transportation office.

And I will say things only have been moving in a positive direction.

We have not taken we're not taking steps backwards at this point.

But at that time, October 24th, we had 214 students remaining on the waitlist.

All were low need level based on the family's self-declared level of need.

Understand our waitlist numbers constantly fluctuate.

When Ms.

Fouts was up here, she was talking about how the L students are coming in constantly.

So I don't want to mislead you.

High priorities will blip on our screen almost every week, but transportation, we're in a routine where they're quickly addressing those.

We have encouraged families, right?

If they've been on the waitlist for a long time and we have such a great community, a lot of families were like, I'll make it work, right?

They declared as low priority when they registered.

If you would like to change your level of need to indicate what you feel it is now, maybe other families in your carpool have gotten bus seats and it's harder for you now, we encourage them to contact the school.

and convey their true current level of need.

And some families have been doing that.

And just for perspective, we started the school year with over close to 800 students on wait lists.

Now, there are a lot of reasons for that.

Some of it is just the quality of data that we have at the time.

It's a little Wild West to start out.

It takes a little bit of time to settle down and figure out, especially where some of our families are who are high need but may move around a lot.

It's challenging to manage through that and make sure we're taking care of the

That's where we've been and where we are now just with regard to waitlist.

12 pupil drivers that are like considered full-time and there's three relief drivers and then three lead drivers and we have added one driver so far since the start of the school year.

What we do still is this weekly progress that you may be thinking how did one driver make that much difference?

It's the weekly process that we go through with school bus logistics and the city people transportation office where we're constantly looking at the self-reported needs of the families or what the schools are reporting to us

and examining actual bus ridership.

And if a student doesn't ride the bus for 10 consecutive days and the school doesn't report that there's an extended medical absence or something like that, they're removed and we can put other students on.

So we're just constantly working the data to make sure that it's as accurate as possible and to maximize the actual ridership on the buses.

So more numbers.

This slide is more focused on the actual driver situation.

Presently, there are three full-time drivers in training who are scheduled for testing this month with DMV.

It's very exciting.

Two full-time drivers are cleared to begin training in mid-November.

That means they've made it all the way through the background checks and everything with

City HR.

There's one full-time candidate in the hiring process and again this was as of the end of October so that that person may be cleared at this point.

One relief driver was in training also scheduled for the DMV testing this month and there were four other relief driver candidates in the hiring process.

So these are the best numbers we've seen in some time.

What we are working to is, and we at this moment as of today because I talk to transportation almost every day, this is still true, we anticipate doing a full rerouting of all eligible students who've indicated they wanted the bus to improve our route efficiencies because the way we're doing it now does not make for the most efficient routes, adding students on and

but with this cadre of drivers coming online we anticipate being able to do a full rerouting for more efficient routes and eliminate all wait lists when the students come back from winter break so during or just prior to winter break because remember the city doesn't have exactly the same winter break that we do but either before we go on winter break or during the winter break there'll be communications pushed out to families almost like the start of a new school year

saying okay this is your you know you indicated you want a bus here's you know you're eligible for a bus you're not in a walk zone here's your bus here's your stop time because so even a child who's been riding the bus since the beginning of the year could end up on a different bus with a different stop time but that's going to in general our students will definitely be riding the routes will be shorter we're going to be able to achieve efficiencies with this mastery routing so this is really exciting it's all a lot of work but we're moving forward next slide

Big picture.

Just to remind everyone, we are in year two of a really new approach to school transportation.

This has been a big culture shift for our whole community.

We remain very solutions-oriented, and we are not alone.

Beth Chuck and Amanda Corman and Dr. Gurley were at a national communications conference and won a national award for all the communications work related to this model that we're doing.

And I don't know how other people hear about us, but Raleigh, North Carolina and Winchester, Virginia have reached out.

We've had conference calls with them, giving them suggestions and guidance.

People are interested and found out what we were doing and they've been very interested in it.

And more recently, our Safe Routes person, which is Kyle Rodland with the Citi Safe Routes to Schools program.

Our work has gotten out into the Safe Routes community nationwide and at the state level and at the national level, Kyle's being asked to speak.

and provide information about what we've been doing for some time now with how we work together to do the infrastructure improvements and all of that is still continuing.

And so a lot of teamwork.

And if people would like to help, help keeping us move forward, we are still looking for substitute crossing guards and also walking bus staff and there are paid and volunteer opportunities available.

As the city is continuing to push infrastructure projects and improvements, they're looking for project managers.

So check out the city's website if you know professionals in that area.

And as always, we continue to want to grow our pool of drivers, including folks who might be interested in getting the S endorsement on their regular license to be able to drive the 14 passenger activity bus.

And I believe that's the last slide for the transportation update.

Any questions at this time?

Ms.

Torres?

Just one quick one.

How do you get the S endorsement?

So there's a classroom portion of the training that, thanks to our Jessica Brantley, we actually have a fully online option for that, but the city is still offering the in-person classes as well.

And then once you go through the classroom portion, then there's DMV testing.

There's special DMV testing that you have to test in the type of vehicle you'll be driving.

So if someone wants to drive, get the CDLS.

It includes different safety things and inspections as well as behind the wheel.

And I should say, besides it, as far as before you get to DMV, there's the classroom portion, which we do have an option where you can do it online.

It's self paced.

and then there's the behind the wheel training portion with city staff and then it goes to DMV.

If you're not intimidated by the size of the bus itself, now what I've been told is that actually there's a surprising amount of mechanical knowledge of the bus that's needed.

and being able to actually inspect things on the bus because that's part of the safety checks.

There are a lot of safety requirements associated with being able to drive a large passenger vehicle, especially one with young children.

Because the S endorsement is even a higher level of requirements than just a passenger endorsement on a CDL.

So my husband cringed every time I drove our Suburban in

Ms.

I just want to say thank you and that's exciting to hear.

And my student got her call that she has a spot on the bus so I appreciate all the hard work you're doing.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I don't want to detract or diminish from the work that's been done because it's been such a huge lift.

But I can't help but connect this work with the discussion about chronic absenteeism and wondering where there is overlap.

And so as we're working at this rerouting and looking at students, I would love for us to connect with principals to see what students are consistently not coming to school.

And we had a student success meeting today and I think you know we are seeing a lot of that hard work and the lift that's coming from principals.

They are talking about how they are innovating with Parent Square.

I mean, they have triangulated down to the day.

So today we had Burnham Moran and they are spot on.

And so I'm very excited about sharing some of that work that they're doing.

And it's going to directly tie with the attendance work that's happening with Dr. Johnson.

And it's been a while since we did that analysis.

We did it early on in the new model with the, and what it showed at that time was that it wasn't really impacting attendance per se, as far as our overall rates.

But what I will say is that a lot of the students we prioritize for bus seats are not, we're not choosing to use them.

And so that's tough.

And so we, I think it's probably worth digging into that data.

Again, we would need help from

and that might be part of the ongoing work about enforcing an attendance policy.

And maybe you don't have a choice about riding the bus if you're not coming to school.

And then also like the possibility of, I don't know, like driving out of my neighborhood, I often see kids that have missed the bus because it's early and they don't have transportation otherwise.

So if they miss the bus, even if they've got their backpack on, they're not going to school.

And so are there,

That's a good point.

As we build capacity, I know we're committed to our walk-ins and there's so many positives from that, but at the same time, those are good points in the attendance situation, looking for creative things to do to improve that.

And Miss Powell probably gonna kill me for this one.

But, but, but Beth Chuck and I talked about this because I commented about the one on your end, because we picked up a student last week.

And so one of the things that may come out of this with the rerouting is that some of those bus stops may move.

And so that one may move even closer.

Ms.

and Ms.

All right, and Ms.

Yes, thank you, Dr. Gurley.

So I'm carrying this item tonight for Renee Hoover, who couldn't be here, but basically

This year has been an unusual budget year in that we received a pretty significant budget amendment that wasn't adopted until September, and that's for this fiscal year.

The big headline items in that amendment are the inclusion of a 2% compensation supplement to go in effect January 1st.

and the prioritization of student learning loss, literacy and attendance recovery, the all-in plan, which you've already heard about this evening.

Next slide.

So the CALC tool that you hear us talk about as finance folks, the finance team just received that on October the 13th.

And once we got that in hand, the team was able to determine that the impact for this year

for the compensation supplement is an additional $217,277.

All in is much more significant amount of money at $946,637.

So those are the impacts that the CALC tool showed us for this year.

So let's talk more about the raise, the 2% salary supplement.

The actual cost for a full year to do the 2% for our teachers and staff is $1,275,605.

Part of this, of course, is the standards of quality for funding education.

Ms.

Dooley alluded to this and the staffing numbers that are put forth in that are not in alignment with what any school district actually staffs to provide.

Even the basic educational services, we do more than the basic services.

Also, of course, the local composite index of ability to pay means that these are the reasons that the actual cost is that, but we only get $217,000 to go toward that.

Nonetheless, it's nice to be able to give a salary action for staff.

To implement the cost for half a year is $637,803.

So the $217,000 goes towards offsetting the $637,000.

We would cover the cost for this year from the additional state funding and the ESSER III funding.

And the full year of this 2% action will have to be front loaded into the budget discussions as you're developing the fiscal year 2025 budget.

Next slide.

Now the all in funding again that is money that is this year's money.

Dr. Odey already covered all this very well that tutoring 70% attendance 10% and 20% must go towards literacy and you heard all about that agenda item 9.1

I am bringing this to you as an information item because Ms.

Hoover and Dr. Gurley will need board action in December on the 7th to amend the budget for this year because again, these are things that are taking place that came through September, October impacting this year's budget.

So you will need to recognize the compensation supplement.

You'll need to recognize the all in money and also take action to authorize the 2% compensation supplement effective January the 1st.

Next slide.

OK, Ms.

Turner, start to my right.

Mr. Dooley, Mr. Morse, Ms.

Morsberger, Dr. Mmkay.

Well, thank you, Ms.

All right.

And our last discussion item is the revised policy FFA.

All right.

Welcome, Dr. Johnson.

Mr. Chairman, members of the board, Dr. Gurley, good evening again.

Now we will be sharing with you a policy revision for a policy FFA, specifically naming of facilities and grounds.

As you know, we have done extensive work over the last several years regarding the renaming of schools.

We are excited about Trailblazer Elementary and Summit Elementary and look forward to the moment when their new names will be posted on their buildings and throughout their hallways.

Last year, as the committee was going through the process with Burnley Moran and Johnson, we hit a standstill.

And the board asked that we refine our processes for the remaining schools.

That work starts here with revising policy FFA.

Next slide, please.

Oh, nevermind, I'm sorry.

I'm so used to saying next slide, my apologies.

We just have the one slide tonight.

It's in my script there.

I'll start with the text that is stricken out.

We heard from several board members that there was no desire to have any facilities named after people.

So we've taken that language out of the policy.

And something I want to specifically point out that we have added is the language in number one and two there.

It fits perfectly with what we talked about throughout our process about place and purpose.

So we wanted to make sure that we had that language in there as we continue

to move forward.

We want to continue as we're renaming our facilities to have purpose and place as our focus and to guide our selections of names.

Please take note of this section that's directly under that, stating that no current or future schools or division buildings shall be named after individuals.

That means that schools that are currently still named after individuals would need to be renamed.

Also note that while school buildings would not be named after individuals if this revised policy is approved, the board could choose to honor the contributions of truly outstanding individuals by naming

portions of school facilities after them, including rooms or sports facilities or parts of grounds as ways to recognize these great people.

You can see there also that we added some gender neutral language there below that.

I believe that's all that we have.

So this policy revision is for information.

Tonight, our communications team stands ready to prepare communications to the families of schools that are named after people.

They would do that work over this next month, over these next several weeks to make them aware that this revised policy is under board review.

It is the superintendent's recommendation that in December the board take action on this revision, or if it is the will of the board, to provide additional revision requests.

And I want to say, just jumping in before the comments from the board, this work, and that's the reason why Dr. Johnson is there as well,

As a part of this work, the team has started to craft

regulations and a standard operating procedure that will help to guide the work of the committee.

Those documents and those guidelines and that work had not been done before.

You all said, we heard that part loud and clear, like what's governing the work, but we know, well, this governs the work, but what's leading the charge in the work,

So the other part of the lift in this is the regulation and the standard operating procedures.

But most certainly those things can't be rolled out concurrently without knowing what will govern the process.

And so that's the reason Dr. Johnson is there.

And so there is another component to this that will

I'm impressed that you remember if you're going left or right.

Of course.

I wasn't sure.

Anyway, now I wanted to thank you for the work.

I was curious about, yeah, just the committee, the components of the committee, Dr. Johnson, Dr. Odey.

Just a quick question.

So after the policy is approved or amended, after we have adopted a policy, there will be standard operating procedures that will guide the work that will be clear to anyone who picks it up what happens.

It's a if-then, definitely works in a logic model, but that

will be rolled out because there's specific language to the policy and to the regulation that will need to happen.

So this work is the precursor.

So after this, then any people, persons who choose to assemble will have an outline of what happened and how it comes back to the school board.

I only have one comment and it's not really, it's just a thought just out there thinking.

I don't know.

if I agree with the naming the buildings or the rooms because it just seems like we're right back in the same place we would have been before.

But also saying that there are also some really great teachers who I think like, oh, they retired.

That would be nice to remember Miss So-and-so or Mr. So-and-so.

So I can see where it's coming from.

And

So it's two sides of it, but I also want to be very cognizant of the fact that we were working on this policy because so many things are named after, you know, people have, there's problematic things in their past when we look at it under a current lens.

So having said that, I do want to balance it out by saying I get it that there are people who make contributions in the hearing now that adhere to our values and things, but I don't know if the naming of the buildings after them works for what we're trying to do.

I don't know if there's some type of other honor.

There is currently a form at policy FFA, the current policy FFA, that anyone who is nominating, currently it's a build, anyone that's nominating a building or whatever to be named after someone, they would complete that form and it would go through a whole process, including the board approving that naming.

So we would, it would not be done

without the board's approval of any grounds or parts of buildings.

Of course, once the policy, whatever we land at with the revised policy, once that is finished, then the work will be, the next steps will be to revise the form and everything else that's involved in the standard operating system.

procedure that Dr. Johnson has been working so tirelessly on.

So there's all of that that comes next.

I guess for me, just kind of piggybacking off the last comment, it just feels it probably should be one way or the other.

I think there's great people that we could honor, but at the same time, I feel like, I'm sorry, I feel like I'm not speaking up loud now.

There are great people that we can honor, but it kind of just moves it into a different space and then the conversation can continue.

So for me, I feel as though we need to move

It's OK for individuals, but we're going to reevaluate the individuals, which is to some degree what we've been doing.

Or just say no individuals are named on school premises.

Can I?

I want to make sure that just for the purposes of codifying this so.

Are you saying with regards to the current policy that no people, I just want to make sure I'm hearing, no people in terms of schools, because that's public facing and no people in terms of complexes.

Is that the current complexes?

Is that future?

To me, there's no difference.

So I would say current and future.

I would say if we're going to allow a name to be in the name of a gym, who's to say that that doesn't become an issue later on?

And I understand that the school board could change that name later on.

It just seems as though you're setting yourself up for another opportunity to have this discussion.

Listen, listen, I understand that are certain individuals that need that should be honored.

I am saying if we are saying no individuals it should not just be for the public facing school building but the all of school grounds.

If I may, we have the MLK PAC and some other things currently in place to consider.

Dr. Johnson was just making the recommendation that

something for you all to consider if we were to keep some names we could consider after every five years or change the policy and consider after every five years.

Yeah, I tend to be in agreement with Mr. Morris about wanting the policy to be one way or the other.

I also just, I don't know, I don't want to be in a position on the school board

of having to decide this retiree is worthy of a space named after them and this one isn't.

That piece, I think the currently existing spaces are more difficult to untangle, but the future piece, I think for sure moving forward, I'm not interested in naming after people if that's the

will of the board and what the policy reads.

But certainly we have some existing spaces that would be tough to justify taking the names off of.

But I like policies to be clean.

I probably won't have much say in this either way, but I guess for me, it's just, I don't really see a problem with things being named after people.

I think it just depends on what person in the background of that person.

So I understand why a lot of like elementary school names were changed because of the backgrounds of a lot of the people.

But I feel like for, I guess, for example, I would say just like the packets like that, like Martin Luther King was

a trailblazer.

He was very integral to American history for African Americans and things and such.

And I feel like that really shouldn't be changed.

And places and after people, I don't really see a need to have that changed either since

I'm not sure if I understand.

Yeah.

For naming different buildings or I guess in the future read different parts of

Yes, we'd want to involve the community, the students of the specific school and families, all of that.

And that's the work that we had done when we worked to rename Venable to Trailblazers and

Trailblazer, and Clark to Summit.

Mr. Bryan, can I add one more thing to the discussion?

Sorry.

When we're talking about the current facilities, and you were talking about the track in particular,

If it was funded, it wasn't all the school.

It was like a donation.

from the, do you know what I'm saying?

I think that that might be a little different because moving forward, if you go, hey, I'm from wherever, and I want to build this thing, you have to name it after me, we can always say no.

But I think that that might be a little different as far as the discussion goes.

And there's currently regulations that's attached to that.

It's in the policy too.

And I'm so sorry to interrupt you.

The second page of the policy, the school board shall also have the responsibility to authorize naming rights for portions of school facilities in order to provide recognition for private individuals or corporate entities that make a significant financial contribution to benefit Charlottesville City Schools.

That's been in there.

It's not new.

And since we're continuing discussion, food for thought, just being honest, that we are moving toward naming, not naming things for people, but we're moving away from that because it seems really hard

for not everyone, but it seems really hard to land on a person that we can all agree on.

I would be completely okay with it being named after MLK, but in order to make it so that there's not blowback, then we're in the situation of treating everyone the same when they're really not the same, but it's like,

In order to rectify the situation, you can't rectify it by saying, hey, we're going to take down this name and replace it with this person who I think is more worthy of the honor, even if that's what I truly believe, because I would leave the MLK Center.

So it's kind of a not a conundrum.

It's just, you know, we're changing names for a reason.

and so when we're trying to put in these little caveats about who it can be named after if we name it after a person at some level we have to be honest and say we're changing Venable's name for a reason that that's not someone we want to honor and that if the music center is named after MLK that's because that is someone we want to honor but that might be a stance for a future board to take but at some point we have to be honest and say like part of the reason you can't

And also on the football field is also named after individuals as well.

And that was recently done about three or four years ago, five or six.

I just want to add that this for me is very challenging.

born and raised in Charlottesville, native product of the Charlottesville City Schools.

And when I think, when we're coming down the pike, when I think about people like Nanny Cox Jackson, who taught at Jefferson School, her granddaughter, Teresa Walker Price, who also worked in the Charlottesville City Schools.

Ms.

Via, and based on what I read, she was a prominent educator,

but the only thing that I disagree in terms of her writings, her books, who depicted African-Americans in a kind light.

And then when I think about Lugo McGinnis, Miss Rebecca McGinnis taught at Jefferson School and was awarded an honorary doctorate at age 100.

So Dr. Rebecca McGinnis at Hampton University.

And I think about Alicia Lugo,

was a former chair of the Charlottesville school board, former teacher who made great contributions in this community.

I just think that we need to really work on reaching out to these individuals, families, just to end the community at large to get some feedback.

These were the only schools, the only facility named after African-Americans.

and Anacost Jackson.

So all these were prominent African-American educators.

So I think when we talk about the track, Curtis Elder, who made a great contribution here in the Charleston City Schools and Garwin DeBury, I forgot, it's another individual coach.

They had a joint name, but these are all prominent people who make great contributions to our school system.

and it just, I think we need to really reach out and get feedback from the community and the families of these people, because these were great educators and I, you know, Mrs. McGinnis taught my father in the 1930s.

I still have report cards that she signed and my grandmother signed, so I think we need to really

Dr. Johnson, did you have anything to say?

No, thank you.

Okay.

Thank you, ladies.

The next item on our agenda is the written reports.

School board members and Mr. Lewis, they've been submitted and duly noted.

Now we have another opportunity to have comments from the community.

If you'd like to speak, please come forward and state your name and your address.

Good evening.

Chuck Moran, native of Charlottesville.

I live in the Cherry Hill subdivision at the end of Cherry Avenue.

I am a graduate of Venable Elementary and Lane High School.

And I rise for a couple of reasons.

One is to thank the board members whose terms are about to expire and to wish you well as you move on beyond this work that you've put in.

And I really do appreciate it as a citizen, taxpayer, and alum of the city schools for the work that you all have put in.

I also would like to remind the board that I have lived, breathed, and slept this issue of renaming since January when I became aware of what was happening with my own great aunt's name, Sarepta Moran, for whom Burnley Moran was named.

And the previous discussion illustrates in great form how difficult this issue is.

The things that Mr. Bryant was just pointing out are absolutely worth keeping under consideration, as is the reputation of all of the educators.

The whole idea of looking back with presentism is a difficult thing to do.

When we take the values of today and try to apply those to the activities of people that undertook those activities in their day, we're going down a really slippery slope.

That's not to defend any of the name changes at all.

But I'm just illustrating the difficulty that we've got in front of us for facing this challenge.

Many school divisions across the country have gone down this slope.

Many have failed, faltered,

And I just want to make sure that we get this done right.

So anyone who is interested, my sister and I have put our philosophy together in a webpage.

It's at what's in a name dot info.

That's what's in a name dot info.

You will not be surprised that we point out deficiencies in the current process.

We also point out things that we feel like we could help with.

I am here to help.

I've got over 40 years in marketing and communications, and if there's anything I can do to help rectify the process for anyone who's involved with this new committee formation, I'm here to help.

I just think that this is, it is a very difficult situation, but it can be rectified and we can lead.

And I want to see Charlottesville of all communities take this leadership opportunity and show the rest of the country how this kind of thing can be done properly and beautifully.

Thank you.

Is anyone else in the room who would like to speak at this time?

Ms.

I have somebody with the name of Zanna Bryant.

And once I promote you, you will have three minutes for comment.

Ms.

OK, I'm unmuted.

Okay.

Good evening everyone.

This has been a really good meeting, like, I almost forgot about it but I'm so glad that I was able to see the live stream on Facebook so good evening.

Thank you so much for all the work that you all are doing.

I just have a couple of quick points.

and they're all positive.

So for the Better Together Boost, I think that sounds like a great idea.

I know that I personally would have benefited from it during some of my academic low points and I know some other students would have too had it existed when I was in school.

So thank you so much for doing that.

I think it's going to be great and it's a great proposal.

To Ms.

Dooley's comments about missing some students at certain schools, I just wanted to like

If I could like thumbs up her comments in real life, I would do that.

I think that people should be thinking about the students who could use a little extra help at schools like Venable, for example, where I went to elementary school and there are a bunch of high achieving students.

And when we would be around students from like Burleigh Moran or Greenbriar, I would be like,

There are also some students who could really use help and I just hope that those students aren't again like in the shadows of the high achievement of their peers.

So yeah, I just wanted to like emphasize what she said.

Also, I just wanted to say thank you for all of the bridge building work that's happening in the community.

My grandma has been a crossing guard for this, her second year now.

She loves it so much.

She really looks forward to dressing up for the students for Halloween.

She spends weeks thinking about her costume.

She asked me to go to multiple stores with her to put it together.

So I'm highly involved in this as well.

But she really loves interacting with the LMA students.

And I also think that the walking bus is a great community building opportunity.

And even though it came from a dire need for students to get home safely, I think that it's given opportunities for neighbors to come outside when the students are walking home from school.

be a part of helping to make sure they make it home safely and to just say hello, especially on Fridays and stuff like that.

And in my neighborhood, where I grew up 10th and Page, I think that that's such a positive thing.

So I'm really grateful for that, grateful for Ms.

Martin and the staff at Venable.

Thank you to Dr. Gurley for, again, being committed to making sure that bridges are being built across the community.

It means a lot to see people out in the middle of the day smiling, greeting each other, and having

Thank you, Ms.

Bryant, very much.

Yes, we have Krista Bennett.

Krista Bennett, I'm going to promote you to panelists, and you'll have three minutes.

Great, super.

Krista Bennett here, 106 Troost Court in Charlottesville.

And I was so impressed by Mr. Gilliken, our student who spoke at first public comment period.

I so appreciate him and his friends, other students advocating for themselves to have enough time to eat lunch.

And I do hope that we can bring the schedules at our schools in line with this.

Everyone in our community or even in our schools is aware of the wellness policy and that it does prescribe 20 minutes of seated lunchtime and 25 minutes of recess time.

I know that was something that our community was really excited about, making sure that our students had.

And I hope that we can do more to make everyone aware of that and hopefully give our kids enough time to eat their lunches.

Thank you, Ms.

Bennett.

Anyone else, Ms.

Cuomo?

Anyone else in the room would like to speak?

Thank you so much, everyone, for your comments.

Now we will pivot to comments from the board, and I think I will look to the right.

Ms.

Good evening board members, Dr. Dooley, everyone in the crowd.

Hi mom, hi dad.

So just some positives and improvements that have been going on around my school, CGS.

So we're positives.

I'm happy to say that from what I've asked my peers, my friends, the student body, that there have been less altercations around the school, which I'm very happy about because whenever there is

Next would be less skipping, which I think that's really good too.

It's important to, you know, be in class, be in school and stuff like that.

And one of my best friends told me the grading policy, she just feels like it's just really strong.

So I think that's really good.

So for improvements, the main one was taking digital payments for fundraising efforts.

A lot of like different fundraising goes on at CHS, I would say, and it's cash only.

And I know that's not the most convenient for everyone, since everything is like

Cash App, Venmo, Apple Pay, and Apple Cash.

And I would say, as someone who uses Apple Pay, it is really convenient just to hold my phone up to a computer, click the button twice, and then just have the money go through.

Instead of having to remember to bring $2, and then when I get to school, I forgot to bring $2, and I don't have $2.

So I just hope that we will take that into consideration moving forward.

The next biggest thing was just making sure that the bathrooms have

proper amenities for young women.

And by this, I mean like tampons and pads and things like that.

And at CHS, I only know one bathroom that has the dispenser and it's in the hallway that's like kind of far from like the classrooms.

It's in like the music and arts hallway.

So I, and I'm pretty sure it's also Peruvian.

So I'm not,

I usually don't use the suspension when they are working, but I know for people who do forget to bring something that wasn't materially important, that those are up and working all around the building and all in the bathrooms and things like that.

Thank you so much.

Ms.

It's very fun to see your parents here.

I'm going to make my parents log on to the Zoom link next month.

But no, I just, as we're entering into November, just want to share my gratitude with the staff and families and students in our division.

I got to spend Monday afternoon at Buford and really enjoyed my time in that building.

The construction is kicking.

It is really,

Yeah, I'll just make a quick comment, a little bit circling back around into renaming and some of the people that were mentioned, Coach Elder, Dee Berry, even Miss Lugo.

Miss Lugo worked with my mother when I was born to a single mother at 16 years old to make sure that she got through high school.

So I'm not discounting the impact that people made.

Ms.

I would just like to say just to circle back only because, you know, I can feel a little more free to speak openly more than I did before to just say that I don't think that the renaming things are complicated.

I think that you can look at past people under a lens of today

because I can look back and there are plenty of abolitionists, there are plenty of people who marched for civil rights, there are plenty of people who during their time said that the things I see around me happening are not right and I think that there could be a policy where you name things after people

who meet a certain criteria.

But I don't think that there is, I don't know if this can, I don't know if we can do it here because we are all, or I feel like the argument gets tiptoed around a lot.

Like, you know, if we wanted to name something after, you know, Ms.

McGinnis, people who are doing work that worked with people across all racial, you know, groups.

when it was not a popular thing to do.

To me, this is not complicated, but as a community, we have to decide what type of conversation we wanna have and how we wanna move forward.

And some conversations I think might be too much for some people, but that doesn't, this is just me saying what I think, like we're trying to go forward and make it as fair as possible when the way it was before wasn't fair at all.

and so we're kind of overcompensating and everyone is kind of getting punished because there was no procedures or policies in place for the decades and decades and decades before and there was no problem.

So I will leave that up to the future board but I think that some things are pretty black and white.

And other than that, I would just like to say to everyone, I hope that they're enjoying the fall and that with all of the events going on in the world, that everyone is taking care of each other and looking out for each other and, you know, taking care of yourself and doing the best you can.

And that's it.

I've written a few things because this is a little hard for me.

And Ms.

Morsberger, thank you for how you ended your comments.

It's a good segue to what I want to say.

Since our last board meeting,

and since the October 7th attack on Israel by Hamas, the world has seen a tremendous surge in anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim sentiments and acts.

We are witnessing a horrific war in Israel and Gaza, which has rightfully upset all of us, including our students.

At times, the horror at what has happened and feelings of helplessness at not being able to do anything have morphed into more extreme forms of hatred and vilification based on ethnic or religious identity.

Our students are not immune from this.

Jewish students are hearing and seeing demonstrations and acts of hatred reminiscent of the Holocaust.

They are anxious and unsure of what those around them are thinking of them because they are Jewish.

There is an eerie silence in the air.

As a Jewish person, I feel this myself.

Some Muslim students are likewise anxious and fearful that they will be equated with the actions of Hamas or that their Jewish peers do not care about the plight of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

The history of this region is so very complicated and hard to understand.

Those of us who care deeply about social justice try to sort the players into victims and villains.

I hope that we, Charlottesville schools, can use our platform as educators to use education and dialogue to make sure our students can remain peers and friends.

and those teachers and admin who have relationships with our students, please check in with them to make sure that they are okay.

Thank you, Dr. Kraft for sharing that powerful statement.

We do appreciate you and we are vigilant.

Thank you.

Ms.

Yes, thank you.

And thank you, Ms.

Morsberger.

I appreciate you as well.

Your thoughts and your heart and your voice.

And the same with you, Mr. Bryant.

So all three of you have had such wonderful contributions and we'll celebrate you more next month.

But thank you all for what you shared tonight.

I also wanted to just give a shout out to Mr. Jack Gillican for, you know, just coordinating and bringing his voice forward for concern.

So I just wanted to

So I was impressed with him showing up and I appreciate, I don't think he's still here, but Ms.

Johnson's response and I know and I trust that we'll figure it out as a division.

Also just a shout out to all of us on the board and Dr. Gurley and the team just to work through collective bargaining and the CEA certification.

and then also just wanted to remind everybody to vote if you haven't done that.

You've got an opportunity to vote early the remainder of this week and through Saturday and then Election Day being next Tuesday.

Thank you, Miss Torres, for those shout outs to appreciate you.

I just want to before I've already said a lot tonight, but I just want to give a shout out to the staff.

for all the great reports tonight.

And you all work behind the scenes.

And a lot of people don't know that you are the glue that holds everything together.

We want to give you your praise.

So we do thank you for all of your outstanding work.

And as Zayana said, this was a great meeting.

And I'm looking forward to the remainder of my time on the board, which will be next month.

and I'll have my final say at the board meeting next month.

So thank you all.

And Ms.

Turner, we just love you.

We love you to death.

Can we adopt you?

You're wonderful.

Thank you so much for your contribution.

Oh, yes, we are loving it.

Thank you so much for sharing your gift.

Thank you, thank you.

I want to thank Ms.

Turner for just accentuating the positive and really sharing the true story of what's happening here.

Just sharing that there's less fighting in the building and not everyone knows that because they're not on the inside.

Now, I did cringe when she said that because her dad's an educator and we don't speak on, we always knock on wood because we don't want to speak those things into existence.

But we know that we have been putting systems and supports in place for our students to experience success.

And so that's why the climate feels different.

So thank you.

And you know,

They say heavy is the head that wears the crown.

And so we know that there's a lot of work to be done.

This is a huge responsibility, being the superintendent, being a staff member here.

And so we know that

Not everyone's going to be happy with the decisions we make, but the decisions have to be made one way or the other.

And so to our board members and staff, regardless of what side of the issues you're on, we will bring back decisions that are in the best interest of students.

So before I go to Miss Swift, I want to acknowledge our lovely wonderful clerks.

Boy, I tell you, they keep us on our toes.

So we do appreciate all the work that you do for not only the board for the Charlottesville City Schools.

So Ms.

Lewis, are you gonna be Ms.

Swift tonight?

I will never be Ms.

Swift, but I'll stand in for her tonight.

So the first question that was raised is, can we expand the ESL data adding an end of the year data?

And the recommendation of the superintendent was to have a written report in June that provides a summary of the state report.

Additional questions came up about what is the impact of the CCS preschool program?

And when we're looking at the data of the preschool program, can we capture that data in cohorts, current cohorts?

There's a new, last year we used a... Yeah.

Yeah, and that's fine.

I mean, looking at that, looking at our students specifically, but with that, that new screener that they're using for literacy, and then tracking them by cohort, to just kind of see the impact of that.

And whether we're capturing them, and then what types of interventions, you know, we're able to focus in on.

Okay.

So can we, can we provide the preschool tracking data by cohorts using the preschool screener?

Thank you, Ms.

Lewis.

Well, we've come to the conclusion of our meetings, but before I turn, I'd like to announce, I'm hoping that all of you all will have an opportunity to come to the V.S., the Virginia School Board Association,

Annual Convention in Williamsburg, Virginia, November 15th through 17th.

So I look forward to seeing you all there.

And our next school board meeting is scheduled for December the 7th here at the Booker T. Reeves Media Center.

Media Center.

I'm just saying.

So is there a motion to adjourn?

Thank you.

All in favor?

Aye.